Emotionally Weird

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘Right, I’ll get you one,’ he said, setting off eagerly across a dance floor that was now strewn with discarded plastic cups and the dog-ends of cigarettes and joints. The room was pitching and bucking like an ocean-going liner in distress and a strange centrifugal force affecting my body made sitting down a sudden imperative and I subsided quietly onto the spare corner of a filthy-looking mattress.

  The rest of the mattress, I suddenly realized, was occupied by Roger Lake, locked on like a lamprey to a first-year girl less than half his age. I would have asked him how his wife and his mistress were but I couldn’t really speak; my tongue had grown too big for my mouth and the centrifugal force was trying to drag me down a black hole. My head had the gravity of a small planet. My mouth felt dry and clinkerish and I reached for an opened can of Export on the floor and swallowed a great draught of it before gagging it all out again, along with its flotsam of ash and butts. Someone loomed in front of me and asked me if I was all right. It was Heather, wriggling unrhythmically to ‘Go Ask Alice’, her nipples jumping in my face. Her voice boomed and ebbed in a distorted way as if we were underwater. Eventually she got fed up with getting no response from me and started talking to Roger in a familiar way which confirmed that they had previously shared more than an interest in Marxian economic theory or a copy of Cairncross.

  I decided to try and make it across the floor to Bob, although it was unlikely that he would be able to do anything to make me feel better. I had once fainted in the Ladywell Bar in Bob’s company and, at a loss as to what to do, he had simply lain down on the floor next to me. An action which resulted in our both being thrown out. I could see him, without the hookah now but with the Finnegans Wake girl, who looked to be sprawled across his lap in uncharacteristic hedonistic abandon.

  I stood up and the room immediately broke up into thousands of little dots, as if I’d suddenly stepped inside a pointillist painting. I couldn’t be sure, but I could have sworn I saw the elusive shape of the yellow dog on the far side of the room. I wondered if it was an hallucination or a mirage? And was the yellow dog now my quest since Terri had gone to hide in a place rhyming with Glasgow? Perhaps, Lassie-like, it was trying to show me the way to Kara.

  I struggled heroically across the wasteland of the ballroom floor, occupied now by a frenzy of people dancing to Santana, only to find when I arrived on the other side that there was no sign of Bob anywhere, or of the yellow dog. It was very hot and airless by now and a herd of people milled around aimlessly, amplified and distorted by the candlelit mirrors and my dappled vision. My blood pressure was low and falling and there was a blackness closing in around me and I knew I had to get out of that room or I was going to pass out, and the last thing I wanted was attention from any of the drug-fuelled medical students in Forres.

  I finally managed to fight my way out of the room, passing Davina on the way –

  ‘There,’ I say to Nora, ‘you owe me a pound.’

  – and entered what must have once been the billiards room, where the air was slightly fresher. No-one was wielding a cue and the green baize of the large billiards table was currently occupied by the apparently unconscious body of Gilbert, splayed out over a Scalectrix set, much to the annoyance of the people who wanted to play with it. Around him, small groups of people, without exception male, were sitting on the floor playing Risk and Diplomacy, Mahjong and – naturally – Go. If only they would. The atmosphere in the room was so boring it could have caused living flesh to petrify and I hurried away, pausing only to heave Gilbert’s prostrate form into the recovery position.

  I tried a door at the far end of the billiards room and found it opened into a small room that was entirely dark, save for the light coming from a television set that was showing Dad’s Army. In the doorway I bumped into Shug, who said, ‘Out on the ran-dan, eh, hen?’ and put his arms around me. He was very drunk and said, ‘So how about it – you and me?’ and I had to push him away and remind him that he was ‘Bob’s pal’ and therefore couldn’t shag me. Where was Bob? Shug shrugged (as he had to do sooner or later). ‘Dunno.’

  * * *

  I lurched on, up a small servants’ staircase to the mysterious upper regions of the house where, in a cold bedroom heated to no effect by an oil-filled radiator, Kara and Jill were sitting cross-legged on the floor. Deposited on the cold candlewick of the double bed was Jill’s child with the unpronounceable name, two more sleeping infants of indeterminate age and – to my extreme relief – Proteus.

  ‘Welcome to the nursery,’ Kara said, lighting up a joint.

  ‘You got him back OK, then?’ I said, looking at Proteus’s peaceful sleeping face.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she said to me. ‘You look a bit pale.’

  ‘I feel a bit pale.’

  Kara reached out and grabbed my wrist and took my pulse in a professional sort of way. ‘I’ve got a St Andrew’s Ambulance Brigade certificate,’ she said, but then she let go of my wrist and said indifferently, ‘You’re dead.’

  ‘Do you want to stay here and babysit for us?’ Jill asked. Dead Babysitter, now that would be a good title for something. I made a vague mental note to tell Robin.

  * * *

  I moved on, back down another small staircase, and tried other rooms, unsure now whether I was looking for something or not. Perhaps like Professor Cousins I would recognize it when I found it. In a small back room I found a solitary boy, alone with a bong and an overwhelming scent of burning sage that drove me straight out again into a room with another television – an old Philips portable sitting in the middle of the floor. There was no audience for the country being burned on screen and I felt I had a duty to stay and watch for a few minutes but then I started to feel ravenously hungry and wondered if I could find my way back to the kitchen.

  Instead, I found what seemed to be a quite separate wing of the house. Forres must have been designed by Borges and constructed by Escher, I had no idea if I was facing north, south, east or west, or even which floor I was now on. I peered cautiously into a room that might once have been a grand upstairs drawing-room but was now a dystopian vision of carnal debauchery as, by the light of several smoky candles, naked bodies writhed in a tapsie-teerie abandonment worthy of Bosch.

  ‘Do you mind?’ a disembodied voice said. ‘This is a serious massage class.’

  I hurried away; nothing would have induced me to stay. I went, instead, into the bathroom, a place of glacial chilliness boasting all its original fittings – complicated brass pipework and florid tiles that would have looked more at home in the Speedwell Bar. An ancient bath, like an ornate catafalque, stood in the centre of the room, its enamel pitted and chipped. Empty of water, it was tenanted by a fully dressed boy wearing a top hat. On the edge of the bath was perched another, very thin, boy in a Black Watch dress jacket. He was clutching a copy of Sgt. Pepper and explaining to the boy in the bath how depressed he felt in a conversation that seemed to have been scripted by Robin: ‘Like really down. I mean what’s the point of it all?’

  The boy in the bath nodded sympathetically. ‘I know – the meaning of Liff and everything.’

  A girl on her knees, as if in prayer in front of the filthy toilet, was moaning quietly. It was the first-year student I had lately seen in Roger Lake’s arms. She lay down on the floor, her forehead pressed against the cold stained tiles. I put her in the recovery position (maybe this was all I was good for in the world) and told the Sgt. Pepper boy to keep an eye on her, but I doubted that he would.

  * * *

  I had to get some fresh air. By mere accident, I discovered the main staircase of the house, a great wooden mock-Jacobean flight of the imagination, carved with thistles and emblazoned with gryphons and strange armorial devices. The tall banister finials at the foot of the staircase were in the form of aggressive wyverns, posed to leap on the unsuspecting passer-by. I scurried past them rather fearfully and into a square hallway that was large enough to merit its own fireplace – black iron, cast in the shape of a scallop
shell, with a padded red velvet fender seat on which I sat down gingerly next to Kevin, who was drinking from a large bottle of Irn-Bru.

  ‘Parties are such crap,’ he said disconsolately.

  ‘I really don’t feel well, Kevin. I think I need a doctor.’

  ‘In Edrakonia,’ he said, ‘the physicians are also alchemists, transmuting base metal into gold and so on. Of course since the Murk fell all kinds of strange diseases have arisen, the fading disease, for example.’

  ‘The fading disease?’

  ‘Self-explanatory.’

  Maybe that was what happened to The Boy With No Name. Maybe that was what was happening to me. I was relieved when Gilbert joined us, remarkably fresh for one who was unconscious so recently.

  ‘Good party, isn’t it?’ he said cheerfully.

  ‘Or the falling disease,’ Kevin continued relentlessly.

  ‘Have you seen a yellow dog?’ I asked Gilbert, ignoring Kevin.

  ‘A yellow dog?’ Gilbert repeated. ‘I didn’t know you got yellow dogs. No, sorry.’

  I pushed my way outside. A bonfire had been built out on the back lawn and was now blazing fiercely. The air was ringing with frost, sparks rose like tiny barbs of light into the night sky, a sky that was swimming with stars. Some people were dragging old furniture out of the house to keep the conflagration going. I saw one of the ballroom curtains go up in a roar of dust and flame. Other people were dancing round the bonfire like members of a lunatic coven. Andrea was one of them. She spotted me and danced over.

  ‘It’s like a planetarium,’ a stargazing Andrea said, looking at the heavens in open-mouthed awe, ‘a kind of … open-air planetarium.’ I told her Shug was upstairs and she danced off eagerly. I felt suddenly cold and sick. I looked around for Kevin or Gilbert but couldn’t see them any more. A threatening figure suddenly appeared in front of me. It was a nightmarish Archie, dressed in a daring pair of youthful flares that were an uncomfortable size too small for him.

  ‘You,’ he said, obviously very drunk.

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘me.’

  ‘Have you seen Dickhead?’ Archie asked, casting his eyes vaguely around the garden. (I was glad Professor Cousins wasn’t there to witness this.)

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Dr Dick,’ Archie said irritably, ‘he’s—’ but just then a tremendous explosion drowned out whatever it was he’d been going to say.

  ∼ Is this a denouement?

  ‘No.’

  I thought Forres must have been blown up by a bomb or a gas leak, but the boy with the top hat who had been in the bath ran by and said breathlessly, ‘Elderflower champagne,’ by way of explanation.

  ‘The protesters are using elderflower champagne? How does that work?’ Archie puzzled to me but I didn’t hang about to explain. I felt claustrophobic, even though I was in the open air, and started trying to find a way out of the garden that didn’t involve going back through the house. I could feel myself falling. Fading and falling – and then a pair of arms encircled my waist from behind and held me up. In my fevered brain I thought I smelt Ferdinand’s masculine scent. ‘Time to get you to bed, young lady,’ a familiar voice said.

  ‘Ferdinand,’ I murmured and rested my head gratefully on his shoulder before finally fading right away.

  * * *

  I woke up slowly to the steady sound of rain. Something as cool and smooth as soapstone was spooning my naked body. I rolled over and saw –

  Dr Dick.

  I propped myself up on one elbow and looked at him in horror. His eyes opened slowly and I was able to observe his brain catching up with them.

  ‘Effie,’ he said, yawning and fondling the pale stalk of his penis in a boyish, asexual way. Had we been having an extra-curricular tutorial of some kind? And would it result in better marks for me? Or worse?

  ‘What have we been doing exactly, Dr Dick?’ I asked tentatively.

  He groped on the bedside table for his little spectacles and put them on and said, ‘I think we’re on first-name terms now, don’t you? Call me Richard, why don’t you?’

  I tried to comfort myself with the thought that worse things could happen to me but just then I really couldn’t think of any.

  A wretched cold fog was coming in from the sea and crawling over the city. The melancholy sound of the foghorn boomed at regular intervals and set up a strange melancholic echo in my bones.

  ∼ Can you have fog and rain at the same time?

  ‘If I want.’

  ‘Tea?’ Dr Dick offered, gesturing vaguely in the direction of his kitchen. ‘There’s no electricity,’ he added, in case I was thinking of saying yes. Dr Dick was helpless without the Monopoly board utilities. I glanced at the clock.

  ‘No, thank you,’ I said. ‘I really have to go, I have to hand in an essay.’

  But first I had to see Bob. Because the last time I caught sight of him was in the massage room in Forres in the oily hands of the Finnegans Wake girl and I wondered if he could give me an adequate explanation of his behaviour. I doubted it somehow. Was he going to leave me before I could leave him?

  * * *

  Nora is walking on the strand – a place that is neither sea nor land and which she says is one of the doorways to the other world. She is careless of the surf washing around her wellingtons. Occasionally she picks up a pebble or a shell and stuffs it into one of the pockets of the large man’s overcoat she is wearing. I suspect she is still wearing the diamonds under her woollen scarf. She keeps looking out to sea with the eagerness of a mariner looking for landfall. She smells the wind.

  ∼ It’s coming, she says.

  ‘What is?’

  ∼ The end.

  She walks off, her pockets bulging with stones. I run after her, battling the wind.

  ‘So … elaborate on the marriage, divorce, death bit.’

  Nora sighs and recommences her tale with almost theatrical reluctance:

  ∼ Effie was packed off to London to some distant Stuart-Murray relation, to be ‘finished’ in some way. It was a shame she wasn’t just finished off. Lachlan went to study law in Edinburgh and when the war started he joined the army and Effie came home to Glenkittrie, where she hung around all day saying she was ‘bored out of her skull’ and there was nothing worse than Effie when she was bored. I used to look forward to going to school every morning – I attended the local primary – just to get away from her. I was ‘the brat’, ‘the kid’. She was supposed to look after me because Marjorie was ill but she never did. There were no nannies or anything by then – the London house had been sold long ago, the Edinburgh house rented out to a property company, there was always a large, but invisible, drain on the Stuart-Murray finances.

  ∼ Kirkton of Craigie was a tiny school; most children came from the farms round about. I spent a lot of time with them outside of school as well –

  Nora pauses and looks pensive. I suppose it’s disturbing for her to go back to a time when she had a normal life, when she had friends, when her future was still full of possibilities.

  ∼ I used to think I must be a wicked child because I felt no love for either Donald or Marjorie. I worried that it meant I would grow up like Effie – incapable of caring about anyone but myself. But it wasn’t my fault if Donald was a foul-tempered bore, Marjorie a drunkard. They barely spoke to me, even less to each other. They were like people who had lost their souls.

  (What a metaphysical turn of mind my mother (not) has.)

  ∼ Then the army started up a camp nearby and Effie wasn’t bored any more. I remember a time when she came home while we were eating breakfast. Her make-up was smudged, her hair was a mess and she smelt of drink and cigarettes and something more rank and vulgar. She used to think that she was so beautiful but sometimes she was the ugliest creature imaginable.

  Donald started shouting at her, calling her a disgraceful whore, a little bitch in heat and so on. Did she want another little bastard? he yelled at her.

  And Effie replied, ‘Not if it turns out as du
ll as the first one.’

  ‘Is that a clue?’

  Nora ignores me.

  ∼ Anyway, eventually she fell pregnant – there was a whole regiment that could have fathered the child but she managed to net an officer and got married.

  Then the war ended—

  ‘How fast time goes in this tale, and you’re leaving out all the details.’

  ∼There’s not enough time for details. Effie’s husband – I think he was called Derek, but I can’t be sure, he made very little impression on anyone, least of all Effie – was demobbed – I think he was a chartered surveyor. Derek, as we’ll call him, even if that isn’t his name, started talking about buying a nice house in a garden city down south and starting a family. I don’t think it had ever occurred to Effie that he might have a life beyond the war. She left him as soon as she saw him in his demob suit.

  Marjorie was dying by then. Donald had had his first stroke. I’d been sent away to school – to St Leonard’s – where all the teachers were suspicious of me because I was ‘Euphemia’s sister’ and I had to work very hard to reassure them I wasn’t like her.

  Lachlan was working in a law firm in Edinburgh. He had a squalid little basement flat in Cumberland Street, in the street next to the family’s old New Town house, now home to an insurance office – that’s a detail since you’re so keen –

  Effie used to go and stay with him there for days on end after her divorce. They made quite a seedy couple. I have no idea what she did all day when he was at work.

  I had to go and stay there once, just before Marjorie died. I must have been thirteen or so. I slept on the couch and Effie said, ‘Oh, no, no room for me, I’ll have to sleep with you, Lachlan,’ and laughed. They both seemed to think this was hilarious. It never seemed to occur to them that Lachlan could sleep on the couch and Effie and I could share a bed.

  It was a weekend and they stayed in with the curtains closed and drank and smoked the whole time. I’d hoped that they might at least have taken me to the Castle. In the end I went out on my own, roamed around Edinburgh for hours and ended up getting lost. A policeman had to show me the way home. It was a shame he didn’t come in with me. I might have been taken away by a welfare officer and had a normal life. The flat was a wreck – bottles and ashtrays, dirty plates, even underwear. Lachlan had passed out on the couch and Effie could barely speak she was so drunk.